David Muñoz: Spain’s New Culinary Enfant Terrible

Slide Show | Dining at DiverXO David Muñoz’s edgy cuisine at DiverXO has secured three Michelin stars and put Madrid firmly on the Spanish culinary map.

Carlos Lujan for The New York Times

By STEPHEN HEYMAN

March 25, 2014

MADRID — Hidden at the end of a quiet street in Tetuán, a working-class quarter here that’s home to South American and Chinese immigrants, DiverXO looks more like an amateur art gallery than a Michelin three-star restaurant. The décor is playfully sinister: swarms of black butterflies cover the walls and ceiling; in the wine cellar are giant metallic ants; on the tables are sculptures of flying pigs. The chef who founded it, David Muñoz, stands out, too, with his mohawk and wooden spike earrings. In an interview one recent afternoon, he described his food as “brutal,” a “gunshot to your head,” and “like porno TV.”

Mr. Muñoz specializes in hyperbole. A meal at his restaurant lasts up to four hours and is designed as much to shock as to delight the senses. Some of the surprises come from the unlikely combination of ingredients — strawberries, coffee grounds, whipped cream and baby squid, for instance. Dishes appear in phases: First the gently poached meat of a giant Carabinero prawn, then its grilled carapace, filled with juice. Each course comes with its own specialized eating tool, like a small silicone shovel. Between bites, a young server might drop by with a spoonful of tomato sorbet and shove it directly into your mouth.

The television travel host Anthony Bourdain came to DiverXO in 2010, when the restaurant had only one Michelin star, and described Mr. Muñoz’s high-wire presentations, weird pairings (wasabi ice cream, cornichons) and grab-bag of cultural allusions — Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese, Italian — as “something that should probably suck.”

He then tasted a kind of shumai stuffed with black pudding and a quail egg, served in a dim sum basket that concealed a deep-fried pig’s ear. “I love my wife, I love my daughter, and then I love this,” Mr. Bourdain said.

DiverXO has since become an obligatory stop for visiting notables (like Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, who ate here this month). Reservations, long among the most elusive in Europe, have only gotten more difficult to secure since November, when DiverXO became the sole restaurant in Madrid — and the eighth in Spain — to have the Michelin guide’s highest ranking, three stars.

That was big news for the Spanish capital, sometimes thought of as culinary flyoverland — especially compared to San Sebastián or Barcelona.

Mr. Muñoz, who was born and raised here, strenuously disagrees with that perception. “Historically, Madrid is not a foodie place, that’s true,” Mr. Muñoz said. “But in the last 10 years it has become a very vibrant city for food — and food from all over the world.” Mr. Muñoz is quick to trumpet the work of other ambitious local chefs; he claims the Spanish capital has Europe’s best restaurants for modern Thai (Sudestada) and Mexican (Punto MX).

Mr. Muñoz, 34, began experimenting with food when he was a child. He remembers his first creation, a disastrous seaweed and squid cake, prepared in the microwave. As a teenager, he went to culinary school by day and by night worked as a line cook in Madrid kitchens. He later spent a few years in London, working at high-end Asian restaurants like Hakkasan and Nobu.

DiverXO has always been a passion project for Mr. Muñoz and his wife and partner, Ángela Montero. After investing their savings, taking out loans and borrowing money from family, they opened in 2007 and spent the first six months sleeping inside the restaurant.

Michael Ellis, the international director of the Michelin guides, dispatched a team of inspectors from around the world to eat at the restaurant about 10 times last year before awarding the third star. “I’ve never seen anything else quite like it. He likes to play with expectations — a big piece of steak that turns out to be tuna cheek, beets that are actually a type of fish,” Mr. Ellis said. “The only real comparison you can make is to Ferran Adrià,” Mr. Ellis added, referring to the Spanish chef who pioneered a similar kind of high-concept, synesthetic gastronomy at El Bulli, his former restaurant on the Costa Brava.

As much as DiverXO’s recent accolade puts Madrid on the culinary map, it also shows how far the Michelin Guide itself has come in terms of incorporating edgier, less traditional restaurants into its most elite ranking. While Mr. Ellis insists that there’s “no template” for a three-star restaurant, 10 years ago it was conventional wisdom that the foodie bible, with its preference for formal service and French accents, had a stifling influence among creative cooks. Some high-profile chefs, like Alain Senderens, Marco Pierre White and Olivier Roellinger, even made a show of giving back their stars to reinvent themselves.

Mr. Muñoz says now such extreme gestures are unnecessary, that you can go your own way without sacrificing stars. “The Michelin inspectors came here, and they saw something new — something that was a little crazy, that wasn’t done in a proper way and didn’t hold it against us,” he said.

But culinary success, in Mr. Muñoz’s case, does not equate with financial success. His restaurant has lost money every year since its inception. DiverXO charges 115 euros, or about $160 dollars, for a 7-course menu and €170 for 12 courses. That’s expensive for Madrid, certainly, but a relative bargain when compared to other Michelin three-star restaurants, like Guy Savoy in Paris, where the least expensive set menu costs €360 per person.

Food costs alone account for almost 50 percent of DiverXO’s overhead. Whatever’s left goes to rent and payroll. The restaurant seats 30, but requires a staff of 32. Staff salaries — including for Mr. Muñoz and his wife — are €1,000 per month. The workday is 15 hours long and ends at 1:30 a.m. Mr. Muñoz says he hasn’t missed a service in six years. “If I’m not here, it may be nice, but it won’t be the same.”

Mr. Muñoz sources seasonal ingredients from 60 suppliers around the world, although much of his food comes from Spain, including a kind of ancient potato that grows on the Canary Islands and Perretxiko mushrooms from the Basque Country that Mr. Muñoz says taste like cucumber. The kitchen is a cramped, sweaty, frenzied space filled with young chefs frying duck tongues, carving Thai coconuts and infusing sushi rice with black garlic. There’s no room to plate in the kitchen itself, so a space that would be the bar area in another restaurant is here transformed into an extravagant plating station, where various ceramic slabs — all designed by Mr. Muñoz — are fussed over until complete.

Mr. Muñoz thinks DiverXO will never be profitable, although he is on track this year to break even finally. He hopes to parlay the recognition he’s garnered here into more lucrative ventures. The first of these is the casual Asian street food restaurant StreetXO, which he opened in 2012 on the top floor of the Corte Inglés de Callao department store in Madrid. A second branch is to open in London, in Mayfair, in June.

“DiverXO is not a business,” he said. “We’ve won all these awards, but until now, we’ve lost money. All these chefs are incredibly young. They’re here every day, pushing with me. The space is so small. To me it’s a miracle we’ve gotten this far.”